The History of Archaeology - Flashcards

During the Speculative Phase of archaeology, which English scholar studied the monuments at Stonehenge and Carnac in Brittany?

Which President of the United States applied the scientific method to the excavation of mounds east of the Mississippi River?

Who was the father of Classical archaeology who published his first Letter on the discoveries at Herculaneum in 1762?

Which Scottish geologist introduced the principle of "uniformitarianism" which held that the stratification (layering) of rocks was due to processes which were still going on in seas, rivers, and lakes?

Which Frenchman published the first evidence in 1841 of the antiquity of humankind and thus discredited the biblical notion that the world was created just a few thousand years before our own time?

The Danish scholar C. J. Thomsen (1788-1865) devised a system of classifying artifacts which proved to be very useful for the progress of Old World prehistory. What was its name?

Which American anthropologist used Darwin's ideas on evolution and his own knowledge of North American Indians to argue that human societies had evolved from a state of savagery (primitive hunting) through barbarism (simple farming) to civilization (the highest form of society)?

What artifact enabled the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in 1822, after 14 years' work?

Who wrote The Archaeology of the United States (1856) in which he argued that ancestors of native Americans had built the hundreds of prehistoric mounds in the Mississippi valley, a claim later confirmed by John Wesley Powell and Cyrus Thomas?

Who produced superbly illustrated books on the Maya civilization in the 1840s, after their travels in Yucatan, Mexico?

Who successfully identified the location of the legendary city of Troy after conducting excavations at Hissarlik, western Turkey, in the 1870s and 1880s?

Who pioneered the technique of total recording and printed descriptions of his meticulous excavations at Cranborne Chase in southern England which set a new standard in archaeological publication?

Which archaeologist brought precise techniques such as the grid-square method to his excavations at Harappa, Taxila, Charsadda, and Arikamedu in India?

Which archaeologist discovered the Natufian culture and found fossil human remains crucial to our knowledge of the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens?

Whose excavations at Pecos Pueblo in northern New Mexico from 1915 to 1929 established a chronological framework for that region?

Who was inspired by Marxist ideas in his book Man Makes Himself (1936) which argues that civilization had arisen in the Near East as the result of a Neolithic Revolution which gave rise to the development of farming, and later an Urban Revolution which led to the first towns and cities?

Julian Steward (1902-1972), the influential anthropologist, highlighted the way human adaptation to environmental conditions could cause cultural change. What was the name he gave to this approach?

Which British archaeologist combined environmental analysis with the collection and identification of organic remains to build up a picture not only of what prehistoric environments were like but what foods prehistoric peoples ate?

What was the invention of American chemist Willard Libby (1908-1980) in 1949 which transformed archaeology?

Which American archaeologist discovered the Bronze Age site of Gournia, Crete in 1901 - the first Minoan town site ever unearthed - and classified the artifacts she found there according to their potential function?

Which archaeologist uncovered a Neolithic farming village at a site in Jericho, Palestine which is commonly referred to as "the earliest town in the world"?

What was the name given to the approach adopted by a group of young archaeologists in the 1960s who sought to explain the archaeological discoveries they made through valid generalizations and to analyze cultures as systems which could be broken down into subsystems?

Which husband and wife team pushed back the known dates of our immediate ancestors by several million years when they discovered the first of many fossil hominid (early human) finds in Olduvai Gorge, East Africa, after searching for almost three decades?

Ian Hodder, the most influential figure in the postprocessual movement of the 1980s and 1990s, is carrying out new excavations at which site in Turkey?

Which feminist archaeologist helped to spark off the current debate on gender roles in archaeology through her research in the Balkans, which created a vision of the centrality of a great Mother Goddess figure to the belief systems of early European farmers?